More than three out of five drivers have not paid a Ulez fine since the scheme was expanded by Sadiq Khan according to data from Transport for London. This is disgraceful! You may recall the anti-car climate leadership policy was inexplicably started by the previous mayor, Mr. Toad who, when he was the motor correspondent for GQ, cost the magazine £4000 with unpaid parking tickets which built up, in his own words, “like drifting snow on a windshield”. Despite all this, Ulez isn’t optional! You’re probably thinking of paying for things at Croydon Tesco.

Bookends
Investment Management firm Baillie Gifford are considering stopping funding book festivals after authors threatened boycotts and activists complained about its alleged links to either fossil fuels or Is**el. I went to a book festival once but I’m not sure we got any money from big oil or the Israeli colonisers because a cream tea cost seven quid and jam was extra but as we tried to read in collective silence I could literally feel the mind-control system from Tel Aviv penetrating the tents, trying to force intrusive thoughts in our minds: “THE GAZA WAR IS SELF-DEFENCE” and “ISRAELI LIVES MATTER”. Then I looked up and saw several Chem-trails in the sky which seemed to converge into a Star of David. Coincidence? I think not.

Skin cancer
Please please please can you stop trying to help people if you’re a white man? The University of British Columbia is looking for an Oral Cancer Researcher but you can only apply if you’re “racialized”, a woman or mentally ill somebody from “a minoritized gender identity group”. Good news if you’re disabled as they haven’t filled up their quota yet so your application will go onto the top of the pile. Sure, having your malignant tumour removed might be nice, but could you really enjoy life guilt-free afterwards if you knew that a white man had been involved in the research? It’s an interesting moral dilemma which you might recognise from the debate surrounding the Pernkopf Topographic Anatomy of Man textbook — an excellent anatomy guide still used by surgeons today, but a book which owed its intricate drawings to the dissections of people executed by the Nazis.

Reduce, Reuse, Recontextualise
Whilst the revolution has calmed down a bit since Covid times, we can always count on the SNP to stay in the vanguard. Glasgow council’s “anti-slavery working group” are cannily using the revamp of George Square to either bin the statues of British Imperialists like Queen Victoria and Field Marshal Lord Clyde, or to “recontextualise” them with plaques explaining how hateful they really were. My suggestion would be to put all the statues inside a huge metal cage so members of the public can throw rotten eggs and vegetables at them. It’s a miracle that the evil Tories didn’t pass some kind of law in the last four years preventing racist monuments from getting taken down but I’m sure they definitely wanted to.

Culture bores
As I’ve explained previously, for most of our purposes there is no culture war. So it was with some relief that definitely-a-conservative Dehenna Davison, a former “Levelling up” Minister agrees, telling Newsnight that the culture was “mythical”, Adding: “I don’t know why we’re fighting it, I don’t know who we are fighting… I don’t know why this is even something that we need to be focusing on.” She said the proudest achievement of the Tory government was same-sex marriage because it showed a party that “isn’t afraid to frustrate its own base”. In fairness to them, they are very good at that. Sadly the 30-year-old Davison isn’t seeking reelection — what a loss she will be to trans rights our country!

Sole belief
Us atheists have good reason to be smug, we are far more likely to believe in a gendered soul trapped inside a physical body the medical transition of children. When asked if people from different religions in the US support making it illegal to transition kids, atheists were the least likely to agree. It’s comforting to know that a lack of belief in a supernatural being makes us more rational and less prone to support morally reprehensible courses of action for children like letting them develop naturally. Can you imagine allowing a male child, trapped inside a female’s body, to go through the horrors of adult development? Pumping them with irreversible puberty blockers is a must. #RightSideOfHistory